That Tesla ‘Flying Car’ Stunt Video Looks Like AI. It’s Real, and a Crowd Watched It Happen
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0.81 sec
Claimed 0-60 mph Time
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5
Tesla Cars Jumped Over
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2028
Planned Production Year
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Low
Fooled Index
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REAL FOOTAGE — Filmed at a live event, in front of a crowd.
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On Oct. 15, 2026, Tesla unveiled a new Roadster at a SpaceX test facility in Texas, and video from the event spread fast. It shows the prototype driving up a towering curved ramp, going upside down, launching off the end, flipping in mid-air, and landing on its wheels. Later it leaps over a row of five other Tesla vehicles. Many viewers assumed the clips were AI.
Snopes found nothing to suggest the video is fake, meaning it was not made with AI tools and was not digitally edited. The event happened in front of a live audience, Tesla livestreamed it on YouTube, and audience members posted their own videos. The car magazine Top Gear said its staff attended and saw the demonstrations, and outlets including AP, CNN, and NBC News reported on it. Tesla CEO Elon Musk even joked at the start, “We need an audience to prove that it’s not AI or SI,” with SI short for “super intelligence.”
Real footage does not mean the car is a true flying car. Musk said it could “fly like a rocket,” but the demo showed a prototype making brief jumps, not sustained flight over any distance. Tesla’s engineers said a suction system under the car held it to the ramp, and thrusters helped it flip and land. CNN reported that the car had no driver on board during the demonstration, which Musk said was so no one would get hurt. The car is not in production, Musk said production would start in 2028, and Snopes noted it is unclear whether a final consumer car would match what the prototype showed.
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A live audience watched it. The event happened in front of a crowd, and audience members posted their own videos.
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It was livestreamed. Tesla streamed the event live on YouTube, so anyone could watch it as it happened.
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Independent reporters covered it. Top Gear said its staff saw the demos in person, and AP, CNN, and NBC News reported on the event.
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Real footage doesn't prove the sales pitch. The demo showed short jumps by a prototype, and the car isn't in production yet.
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✅ Real Footage, Big Promises
The Roadster video is real, not AI. It was filmed at a live event that was livestreamed and covered by reporters. What is still unproven is the “flying car” claim itself: the demo showed short jumps by a prototype with no driver on board, and the car is not yet in production.
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Did Kmart Really Sell Pet Monkeys in the 1960s? Yes. The Famous Photo Is the Fake Part
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A Facebook post this month claimed Kmart used to sell pet monkeys. The poster remembered his dad taking him to a Canadian Kmart in 1962, where he said a cage in the back held monkeys for sale, and readers argued about it in the comments. Snopes rated the claim True. Newspaper archives show that at least some Kmart stores in the U.S. and Canada sold monkeys in the 1960s in a pet department called the “Pet Circus.” In 1965, a handful of Canadian newspapers ran a full-page Kmart “pet circus” ad with an illustration of a squirrel monkey, and a North Dakota paper mentioned monkeys at a Kmart pet department that same year. Sears also offered monkeys and other animals in its catalogs from 1956 to 1964. The part that isn’t real is a popular photo of a Kmart worker holding a monkey while a family looks on. Snopes called it an apparent fake, since a real vintage photo like that would have been widely shared for years. Pet monkeys turned out to be hard to keep, and the first U.S. sanctuaries for unwanted ones appeared in the late 1960s.
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Most AI-Written Fact-Check Notes on X Come From X’s Own Bots, a New Report Finds
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Community Notes is the feature on X that adds a fact-check note under a post. Since 2025, X has let AI “note writers” propose notes, but people who normally disagree must still rate a note helpful before it shows. A new analysis by the news site Indicator, based on a paper from X’s own Community Notes team, found that six AI writers run by X itself produced more than 90% of the AI-written notes in September. In June, those six bots drafted about 240,000 notes, and about 3,600 were rated helpful. Indicator reported in May that just eight AI bots wrote about half of all visible notes. A note under a post can still be useful, but it may have been written by a machine, and in many cases by the platform itself.
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YOUR REALITY DETECTOR TOOLKIT |
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Today’s Skill: Don’t Assume ‘Looks Like AI’ Means It Is AI
Real events can look unreal. The proof is in who else saw them.
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Look for a live audience and a livestream
The Tesla stunt was streamed live, and people in the crowd posted their own videos. Many separate recordings of the same moment are much harder to fake than one clip.
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Check whether outlets you trust were there
Top Gear said its staff saw the demos in person, and several major outlets reported on it. Reporting from people who were in the room is strong evidence.
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Separate ‘the video is real’ from ‘the claim is true’
The footage was real, but a true flying car was not shown. A real video can still be used to back up a claim that goes further than the video does.
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